


Spiraling To Meet Me

by Mauser_Frau



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Attempted Suicide, Blood, Character Study, Child Abuse, Dead animals, Deceased parent, Gen, Gore, Hunting, I've never actually seen anybody whump Tyreen before, Mercy Kill, Mourning, Squick, Tyreen Calypso POV, Tyreen being Tyreen, Violence, Whump, children dealing with grief, dead dove do not eat, medical gore, supernatural destruction of a fetus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:28:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28249140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mauser_Frau/pseuds/Mauser_Frau
Summary: 7" Tafubar Mix.  Tyreen grieves for her mother in a way that makes perfect sense to her, just no one else.  Will she open up to her brother or will she suffer in silence?You can look at this as spoilingSatelliteor as giving it dramatic irony.  This story rated mature based on the details of Leda's death and other graphic medical content.Part of the Nekrotafeyo portion ofGrimeverse.  Companion story of "Spells".
Kudos: 4
Collections: Grimeverse





	Spiraling To Meet Me

1.

The first person she ever met, she killed.

He was too small to live. She couldn’t do anything to save him. He went into her as a flash of syrup and heat. 

(She’s never been certain how she recognized him as a  _ he _ in the brief moment she knew him through her mother’s skin, but she did, surely as she knows she’s female.)

Her little brother’s taste left her dizzy with delight as she sprawled in Leda’s sandy glass remains and the air coral rattled against the rift of sky in the temple roof.

Troy, too stunned and hurt to cry, rattled too.

~*~

2.

Tyreen’s body felt joyful and spilled open and  _ afraid _ . Her conscious thoughts remained stuck on the overwhelming sweetness, dim in the aftermath of what had happened.

Mama had put one of the old Jakobs pistols in her mouth. She wouldn’t cry by herself in the hours before dawn anymore. She would never give another fencing lesson.

She might have been crying about the baby in her belly. That was a thing that happened. Right? 

Tyreen struggled to remember. Dad found her like that.

“Tyreen Heléna DeLeon, what did you do!” He lunged at her. He only stopped himself right before he would have brushed her skin and died too.

Something sparked from that sliver of fear she held.

“I didn’t mean to!” she screamed.

So her fear lit. It burned away. 

Mama hadn’t needed to suffer through her crooked shot. She hadn’t needed to die either, but she’d made that decision without asking any of them. Especially not the little fish fetus who hadn’t realized that her heart was going to stop and he would starve.

Tyreen had gotten him with the dregs of her mother’s life. She hadn’t had any idea he existed before he evaporated in her Leech. He was the only accidental part.

Meanwhile, she lied. Her father sat at her feet and wept. 

~*~

3.

They all cried. Tyreen did it in the water closet where nobody saw.

It was all so  _ stupid _ .

Neither Dad nor Troy noticed her tears after the first night or that there had nearly been five of them stranded on Nekrotafeyo. No crystal clump of sand in Mama’s remains gave her away. Tyreen’s eyes didn’t get puffy when she wept. 

She climbed up the toppled stones along the path to the temple one more time, a bucket of Mama braced against her stomach. She remembered not to eat the small larvae and worms that grew there because they could still become big things, and then they could make more of themselves.

The thought pulled her back. She still licked her lips when she remembered her little brother, stepped slowly as she considered other ways she might have experienced him. Maybe she wouldn’t have ever touched him if he’d been born, but she could have heard him, seen him, smelled him when he was brand new and still wet.

Instead she ate him and he was gone except for the sense memories that crawled around on her tongue and some unfamiliar space in the bottom of her belly. She guessed it was her own little ocean, empty and small. 

She loved being able to feel it at last.

She hated why and her bucket was getting heavy already. 

~*~

4.

Tyreen didn’t stay away from the grave like Dad. Mama wasn’t there.

She didn’t go to the grave after midnight like Troy. Troy told her Mama wasn’t there the one time she asked.

Sometimes when summer traced over the valley, she listened to the air coral shudder in the glassy breeze. Her mouth watered and she balled her marked hand into a fist. She pretended she didn’t remember anything about the sound. She didn’t think about the sky that day or Mama or  _ him _ . In the evenings, she wouldn’t walk past the grave with any sentimental purpose. 

It grew lucernae parasites in its air coral bracken and she liked to eat those. She was checking to see if any had bloomed. She was  _ hungry _ . Again and like always. 

Lucernae made more of themselves with insectoid fungal forms Dad called moth-pollen. Complicated things. Tender and fresh to the taste. More or less how she imagined newborns must be like in ordinary senses.

Mama wasn’t there, so Tyreen told herself — having another baby wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world. People didn’t cross whole kingdoms of life in their wombs like lucernae. They didn’t usually die giving birth. What was losing blood and hurting compared to a little boy they could have used to keep Troy warm?

But the books and vids in the medical suite that she’d poured over to prove this to herself, they still made her cringe. Tyreen hated it. Birth was a bodily function. It shouldn’t have  _ gotten her _ to watch. She was supposed to be stronger than blushing and shrinking and gagging and crying. She was supposed to know bodies for all the succulent grossness that they were.

Then again, she’d missed that Mama was pregnant.

She’d missed that she might be biased about what was and was not awful about that state of being. She’d never not eaten for two.

~*~

5.

Dad tasted rich, Mama stale as recycled air. Troy held no flavor or sensation outside of his skittering pulse and snag of  _ wrongness _ somewhere on the far side of her touch when he rested against her.

He owed her more than that. He had to know that much. He should have had two soft hands instead of one boney one. He should have had a taste when she fed him, backwards as that sounded.

She was starving through the rains the one time she tried to eat him with any seriousness. What if he had something delicious to give her after all, just like their brother had? 

And what if he stopped moaning about his scar being sore? What about that?

Tyreen shushed him. She wrapped her arms and her Leech around him, pouring herself against his body and begging him to slosh back, fill her with life instead of the other way around. 

The Leech tore his way. She drained into him, slow and crystal damp, even though she hardly had enough to share.

“It’s OK,” Troy told her, gently scratching her fingers. “We can go outside again soon. You’ll get something nice to eat.”

Back on the couch, Dad laughed at whatever played on his old video screen. 

Tyreen leaned against her brother, whispering, “Shut up. You’re such a baby. I hate it.”

He didn’t act like he’d heard her. 

~*~

6.

Troy didn’t do anything about the fact that he  _ had _ for a few days. Then, he brought Tyreen out into the grown over places in the old ship. Blinking, humming equipment filled an unfamiliar alcove freshly cleaned down to the graph lines on the floor. 

“You’re right. I am kinda a baby. Now Mama… she might not be able to… you know…” He put his hand behind his neck as his voice cracked.

Tyreen nodded.

“T-there’s this old combat sim. It doesn’t work so good anymore. Visuals are all blocky, but I mean, we could spar and I probably won’t get hurt that bad.”

Tyreen grabbed one of the visors. “Lemme see!” If anything, the alcove sounded like it might quench her boredom.

Troy hooked her in. She saw herself standing in a cheap color-bled rotoscope of an arena. Her opponent wasn’t Troy, but a sad, washed out approximation of a person, not gendered or muscled.

She walked up to them, waving her hand in their face. They bowed, stiffly.

“Hey, can you change how the guy looks?” Tyreen asked.

“Ah, yeah! And acts.”

“Make him look like me, but a boy. And make him really good!”

“What?” Somewhere past her distorted field of vision, her brother laughed. 

The figure flickered as sliders, scans changed somewhere in the makeshift operations booth. By the time Troy finished, he’d nearly gotten their creation’s hair the same texture as their own. “So, what do we call him? Tyrone?” he teased.

“No, his name’s Aries. And you made him super hard, right?”

They both sighed.

Aries was taller than her, heavier than her. He knew things about fencing and shooting that she did not yet comprehend.

His face was that of a child.

Tyreen loved him with all of her stomach, especially when he knocked her into the imaginary dirt.

~*~

7.

They spent the rest of the rains getting covered in bruises, just especially Troy. By and by, they made a whole army of guys to play with, but Aries remained. If Tyreen didn’t fight him with her brother, she met him after midnight, tweaked the line of his nose to match hers and swung at him until her shoulders burned.

Dad had to tell them that the sky had cleared.

So out they went. They feasted on hexlings and mating-ruined mollusks banked glistening at the curves of the river. They went back to the basement when work finished or they read together in bed. Sometimes they stayed out overnight, hunting or diving or harvesting air algae from the lush tracts down South.

Tyreen’s only interruption of a thought: how much they could have carried if there’d been three of them!

But there were two and Troy had mostly figured out how to hunt with his one hand. They ate eggs together if they found any since Dad wasn’t there to call them wasteful. They made their own bedrolls, but they usually slept in one, her spooned against his back ‘so the mantas didn’t get him’.

He asked her though, one night when they were starry-skying it, no tent and no fire, “You really didn’t mean it?”

She wasn’t sure if he meant what had happened with Mama and their brother or her hand resting catty on his waist. His hip bones were so fun to poke. Tyreen pinched him and sank down in the covers. She pretended to sleep.

Troy didn’t press her about it in the morning. They went back to the homestead, their travois overflowing with meat and algae. They brought it in on their own time, packing it away as they liked. No one greeted them. This was usual for evenings in their lives.

Troy put on one of the old, airy tracks that Mama had liked to play on summer evenings. He was trying to sing with it and maybe Tyreen joined in. At least, she was whistling along under her breath when— 

“Boy, you shut that off!” And a crash so sharp and musical Tyreen thought at first it must have come from the speakers.

She peered into the front room to find Troy rattling in a corner. One of the good drinking glasses oozed down the wall. 

Her brother took half a glance at her. He bolted over the travois tracks and down to the grave.

Tyreen cleaned up the broken glass. The rye vapors disappeared on their own. Without her brother to argue, she also pocketed a fair amount of the good, light blue algae for herself. One stain on the top sheet showed that she’d cut her finger. 

That part didn’t bother her. Everyone bled. She knew that better than anybody left on the planet.

~*~

8.

Tyreen slammed her marked hand down beside Dad’s head.

He startled awake, stared up at her, tried to smile.

“Throw anything at Troy again I’ll do to you what I did to Mama.”

She doesn’t remember what he said to her, besides calling her  _ Starlight _ . That might have been all he managed. Anything else — too much to hear, not enough for her to care about.

Tyreen fumed at him, predator sounds grinding in her throat. Then she stalked off. Her heart slammed in her chest and her joints went slippery.

It had taken her days to decide to do anything. It hadn’t come to her as impulse like hunting or dodging or staying up way too late watching video clips of fetuses kick. 

She guessed she didn’t care about Troy in that particular  _ impulsive _ way that would have let her consume him. He wasn’t an eating, spinning, loving on thing to her. He wasn’t even good at hunting. He’d just gotten to the point where he didn’t die all over the place like certain other brothers. 

When she herself reached Mama’s grave, she spit up and coughed. She didn’t cry. Crying was dumb.

Nobody followed her to ask if she’d shed any more teeth or eaten anymore siblings. The moth pollen swam thick against the cut still healing on her hand.

Anyway, Dad never threw anything else at Troy.

~*~

9.

She knew something had changed inside of her when the dull cramps started in her guts. It explained the tightness in her chest and late night heart flutters; the ache above her pubic bone.

The blood came in red and thin, like water from washing a wound.

It had been a long time since she’d been so aware of her uterus. The sensation brought her a stain of toffee taste somewhere under her tongue, one memory sticking to another. 

She cleaned herself up and went to look for the rag stash. It turned up in the cellar with the tents and ammo. At least the rags were clean. She stuffed one into her pants and grabbed a handful more. 

An ECHO chip glinted between the wicker weave of the box. Tyreen palmed that too. She marched back through the common part of the homestead.

Troy pulled a face seeing her handful of scraps. “Umm, congrats?” he said, pressing his tongue through his crooked teeth.

Tyreen shrugged.

“Let me know if you want to spar.”

“I’ll let you know if you can pretend to be a heating pad.”

They hummed back and forth at each other before dissolving into snickers. At the sound of their father’s footsteps, Tyreen took off behind her partition, jambing the slide after her.

She stripped off her clothes and sat on a rag, fussing with the adapter to plug the ECHO chip into her Coeus reader alongside one of their ancient sets of headphones.

She breathed and pressed play before the file data loaded.

Mama had a heavier voice than she remembered.

_ Hey, Lil Ty. It’s your mama. Or whatever you’re calling me by the time I let you have this. I’m not going to choose for you. You’d never be happy with that. _

_ Today’s the day you realized your brother looks different from you. I was expecting you’d throw a tantrum when you found out you didn’t get a penis, but no, you took the news like a champ. Your brother seems more disappointed he has one. Anyway, I’m proud of you. Especially since your. Emotional. Regulation. Is. Not. Great. Heh!  _

“Hey, that’s bullshit,” Tyreen said as if Mama could hear her, as if it even mattered now, five years after she’d been gone.

~*~

10.

Troy was in a bad way, feverish and unsteady on his feet. He’d gone through two nosebleeds the past day. One had soaked his bed.

Tyreen half-carried him to the bathhouse and stripped him since he couldn’t seem to get his clothes off himself. After, he floated listless in her grasp, raking his wet hand over his face between sighs.

She ended up pulling him to the shallow spaces and hanging on, him in one arm and a washcloth in the other so he’d stop trying to clumsily scrub himself.

“I’ve only been in here by myself since she’s gone. It’s funny,” Tyreen remarked, trying to fill the wet silence.

Troy nodded. He wouldn’t hold still though, drifting in closer across the bubbles and swaying like he might offer his restless fingers to her.

Was he hungry? She’d fed him hardly an hour ago. His skin felt so thin, his pulse tachy and faint. She hoped the hot water would bring his pressure up.

That seemed like something he needed. Maybe more words besides.

“I meant it. Sorta,” she said, years too late.

Troy stared at the water between them. “I’m sorry. I think I nodded off there. I missed something.”

“I said I…” The words slipped around in her mouth. The subject changed without her wanting that in any clear way. “I said I don’t actually want you to die.”

His wet hair dragged in his face. He tried to smile. “I don’t really wanna die, but I might not get a choice anymore.”

“I do,” Tyreen shot back. 

The next part should have been about them being stuck together, about living as fish outside of Mama.

But the conversation pulled around and they ended up talking about Keats as he melted against her, sighing and nibbling her skin.

“You’re an asshole and you’d better stay. There’s stuff we haven’t hunted down and killed, you know.”

~*~

11.

The second person she met, she killed.

And the third.

And the fourth.

And all the rest. There were nine Maliwan researchers altogether and Troy only got one, the one that grabbed him. The guy looked to Tyreen like he was feeling Troy up. Mostly, he pissed her off.

She wouldn’t have liked to have eaten him. Instead, she sang through the rest, sucking them down. The living bruise beneath her skin had them in gushes of fear and the kissed-out brightness of their wonder. Some were savory, others liquid tart. When they were all gone, she twisted on the toes of her boots and went down of her own accord.

The rain stirred over her and the mud. She thrilled with what she’d gotten from them, flavors and memories of screams and her personal joy, so hard it made her mouth water.

Troy came around and tried to get her to stop laughing by tickling her feet— a dumb thing to do, but it worked. She remembered him, and his non-taste and his thin skin.

They knelt together in the rain, surrounded by newness and dead bodies made of sand.

And they laughed.

“That fucking Aries program, Ty. That fucking worked. That’s crazy!” Troy howled.

The two of them set to the corpse and the husks like hungry mantas, plucking and searching and screeching at everything they found that tempted them. 

Tyreen fanned through the pelvises of the female-looking ones. She found nothing of note. One had made a lot of glass, but everything from glowbugs to marrow bones did that by chance.

~*~

12.

It took hours to stash and secure their booty. They could only carry so much at one time, so they took the silliest, prettiest things like rings and name tags and a pocket knife so fragile it wouldn’t have been useful for trimming even tiny pieces of air algae. It was  _ new _ . They wanted it for that reason alone.

They hiked back over storm-slippery stones, barely five sentences between them on the way.

It was when the lucernae on Mama’s grave came into view that the slickness surfaced again in Tyreen’s joints. She paused, scenting the air. There was only home and water. Dad knew his place at least to the point there was no need to think about him tonight. Her hand went to her neck and she sighed.

She wondered, if only for a moment: what if she hadn’t eaten the intruders? What would she be doing now?

Talking or waiting or something. She wouldn’t have the pocket knife. And Troy, wouldn’t have gotten a sharp blow to his belly that now needed checked for internal injury. They walked on. He wasn’t limping that badly, so she had no problem pulling him into the medical suite like they were dancing and not fleeing a murder scene.

The control console had broken a long time ago, and they’d patched a backup computer in with some old crystalline cable. This meant that anything they tried to read out of the databanks would show at next startup.

Tyreen realized too late she’d been the last person in the medical suite and she’d left a rather gruesome birth video cued up. 

Troy, leaning sideways on the table, said, “Oh. My bad. I was just thinking about…” He yawned. “…stuff.”

“Yeah? I mean, whatever. It’s a thing that happens, right, killer?” And she laughed, trying to stifle the crash in her heart. That was one of her videos, but there her brother lay, trying to take it from her.

“Ah. Yeah. It kinda is,” he sighs. “And there’s stuff we never got to ask and maybe I was curious. It’s probably weird.”

“Not really. Hey.” Tyreen spoke in a cool and rhythmic way through what she said next. “You wanna watch a few together while the scan processes? There’s a real bloody one with a breech twin in the sutures folder.”

“You know I do.”

Tyreen honestly wouldn’t have guessed. Well then. They cuddled up together while the computer chugged, watching on the magnification monitor so they could zoom in and point.

Her body still twinged with some strain of empathy, but she swore she felt it in her brother’s too, there where she knitted her fingers against his hipbone for a change.

~*~

13.

The jump drive from the Maliwan ship was brand new and still wet. They had no way to graft it into the remains of Dad’s ship. Those were, twenty years after the crash, just that. Remains. Picked apart and bleaching in the sun. Air coral thick as fog had eaten the engine compartment.

The shuttles were mostly still alright. They needed cleaned and powered up. Otherwise, the twins would have been working in the dark besides dragging parts between Mama’s grave and the lesser wreckage strands, now blown over with bone ash and blue sky.

Any parts or tools they needed to keep in the living spaces, Tyreen tossed in with the period rags. Troy pretended not to notice.

It took them the better part of a standard year, digging and smirking and striking and being down there in the shuttle guts.

“What even are you hunting out there?” Dad demanded once. “We got plenty of food! It’s not like you can build a palace out of manta bones!”

“I’m hungry,” Tyreen told him.

He seemed ashamed he’d opened his mouth to her about it.

Neither of them mentioned it again. Tyreen went elsewhere into the old alcoves that night, far past the place where she’d stored her bags and the cages she meant to fill with Djira and hexlings come the next night or so because on the third she’d be leaving.

The combat sim buzzed as she started it up, one of the fans flying out of sync. Underneath the helmet, chunks of the crowd simply didn’t show anymore.

Aries stood at the ready. He bowed to her when she stuck her hand in his face.

“I can’t take you along,” Tyreen said to no one. If it wasn’t a combat command, he simply didn’t understand. “You’re almost done in anyway.”

His idle emote clipped strangely, so his arm halfway vanished.

Ran in the family, she guessed.

The first Aries, the real one, hadn’t realized he’d be dying with Mama. Now the second one didn’t even see her, the person who’d kind of made him.

“I had fun,” she added. She switched off the machine.

~*~

14.

At the bower that was Mama’s grave, she let herself taste it one last time — the night and the lucernae.

She ate the last down to dust, not only the pollen but everything they were.

They’d grow back. They always did. She could leave voids in the air coral as wide as her heart. They’d rot there again next season even if she didn’t get to see them, devour them.

She let herself hear it one last time, the recording Mama left, played on the ancient headphones that weren’t exactly hers.

Besides, what was it Mama used to say…

When she’d first seen the scan of Tyreen and Troy’s tangled embryos, she hadn’t believed her eyes. They were swimming like two Pisces fish in her ocean. The sight of them left her joyful, spilled open and afraid. Babies weren’t supposed to be fish, but these two were special, she knew it. She was going to keep them, somehow and no matter what. Even if she had to wear the remains of their bones around her heart for the rest of her own life.

So as for Aries, where did that leave him? Well, he was still dead. His bones had gone with hers, nothing visible of him in the dust. His taste, his memory remained. Nothing more. Nothing less. As if he could be less.

Now that he was over and had been, forever in her stomach, for so much of her own meandering life. 

Tyreen licked her lips. Her purpose had come. 

Still. She decided she’d be a good  _ little fish _ this one last time. She’d turn in early.

And tomorrow… 

~*~

15.

The third or fourth person she meets on Pandora is a barkeeper who asks her name and how she takes her whiskey. Tyreen sits at the side of the counter, dazed and trying not to smile. She suspects the whiskey she gets isn’t whiskey at all. Anyway, it doesn’t smell like Dad’s, but it shows up in a glass lowball and it makes her lips sting.

She thinks she should wait for Troy to get out of the can, but if she takes a sip herself he can’t ask her to toast.

She drums her fingers on the fine chips along the bottom and remembers.

“Yes?” says the bartender.

“Huh? Yes, what?”

“You look like you’re a million miles away.”

Tyreen cranes her head to the side. That’s a the sort of thing her brother would comment, not some random person. Right?

Besides, the barkeep has to go and add, “Haven’t named the little guy yet.” She jerks her thumb to the calico bundle in an old ammo crate. “Was gonna wait till he turns three months. Never know around here. But hey, now I never have to be lonely again.” She laughs.

Tyreen presses her fists to her knees. She will not blush. She will not cry. She won’t say  _ yes of course that’s what it is _ , because that little boy who isn’t hers remains a flickering, tender place.

Part of her wants to eat this woman and her son.

But it takes more of her self-control than she’d like to keep her face steady, to  _ think _ . “Oh, I get it.” She smiles too. She shows her teeth. “Does he like music? I could go for some tunes.”

“Sure. What kind?”

“After dark in the summer.”

Apparently, that’s a fine enough answer. Troy comes back to the bar to find her gone in her glass and a softly thudding baseline.

He doesn’t even ask her to toast, just sits down beside her and drinks himself.

Dizzy with delight she tells him, “I hear air coral in the breeze.”

He nods like he knows what she’s telling him. 

**Author's Note:**

> AN: Originally ran on Tumblr as a janky 1,800 word ficlet. The Tafubar remix part is a reference to “The Wicked Thought Of You- Snowflake Mix” being the perfect instrumental to write Tyreen stalking around Nekrotafeyo. No actual Tafubars were harmed in the production of this fanfic. Hey, why is TROY the only one who's allowed to mourn Leda? Did anyone else ever stop to wonder about that? Just me? Oh. Anyway, not for sale or rent. Thank you for reading! Please feel welcome to drop me a line if there's anything you need/want to know about the brats.


End file.
